Enemies or allies: Liberalism and catholicism in Lord Acton’s thought

"Lord Acton is known mainly by his famous maxim that “power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” Those who are more familiar with him know that he was a great nineteenth-century historian and political thinker, a passionate lover of liberty who, unfortunately, failed to complete his long-term project—the history of liberty—and thus became the “author” of “the greatest book that was never written.”2 Specialists in Victorian England, the British Catholic press and the Catholic liberal movement of that epoch are further aware that Acton was a very pious Catholic and an ardent liberal, who spent much of his life on failed attempts to reconcile Catholicism and liberalism. Some of them are puzzled, as were Acton’s contemporaries, how a man of his enormous erudition and political wisdom could have dreamt about succeeding in such a Sisyphean task. Liberalism, after all, was a child of the Enlightenment, hostile to any religion in principle and Catholicism in particular."(...

Rousseau and the roots of modernity

W artykule przeanalizowano tematykę źródeł współczesnych wojen o kulturę w myśli Jana Jakuba Rousseau. Autor wskazuje, w jaki sposób myśl osiemnastowiecznego Francuza stanowi punkt odniesienia dla współczesnych stron dyskursu na temat wojen kulturowych

Making use a new open-multipurpose framework for more realistic estimation process in project management

YesThe current turbulent times call for adaptability, especially in non-repetitive endeavours being a vital characteristic of project management. The research organized along five objectives commenced in the autumn of 2008 with a pilot study. Then it proceeded through an inductive research process, involving a series of interviews with well-recognized international experts in the field. In addition conceptualized long-running observation of forty-five days was used, before proposal of a new framework for improving the accuracy of estimates in project management. Furthermore, the framework’s “know-how to apply” description have been systematically reviewed through the course of four hundred twenty-five days of meetings. This achieved socially agreed understanding assured that it may be possible to improve accuracy of estimates, while having flexible, adaptable framework exploiting dependency between project context and conditioned by it, use of tools and techniques

The importance of contextual factors on the accuracy of estimates in project management. An emergence of a framework for more realistic estimation process

Successful projects are characterized by the quality of their planning. Good planning that better takes into account contextual factors allows more accurate estimates to be achieved. As an outcome of this research, a new framework composed of best practices has been discovered. This comprises an open platform that project experts and practitioners can work with efficiently, and that researchers can develop further as required. The research investigation commenced in the autumn of 2008 with a pilot study and then proceeded through an inductive research process, involving a series of eleven interviews. These consisted of interviews with four well-recognized experts in the field, four interviews with different practitioners and three group interviews. In addition, a long-running observation of forty-five days was conceptualized, together with other data sources, before culminating in the proposal of a new framework for improving the accuracy of estimates. Furthermore, an emerging framework – and a description of its know-how in terms of application – have been systematically reviewed through the course of four hundred twenty-five days of meetings, dedicated for the most part to improving the use of a wide range of specific project management tools and techniques and to an improvement in understanding of planning and the estimation process associated with it. This approach constituted an ongoing verification of the research’s findings against project management practice and also served as an invaluable resource for the researcher’s professional and practice-oriented development. The results obtained offered fresh insights into the importance of knowledge management in the estimation process, including the “value of not knowing”, the oft-overlooked phenomenon of underestimation and its potential to co-exist with overestimation, and the use of negative buffer management in the critical chain concept to secure project deadlines. The project also highlighted areas of improvement for future research practice that wishes to make use of an inductive approach in order to achieve a socially agreed framework, rather than a theory alone. In addition, improvements were suggested to the various qualitative tools employed in the customized data analysis process

Two-headed eye-segmentation approach for biometric identification

Iris-based identification systems are among the most popular approaches for person identification. Such systems require good-quality segmentation modules that ideally identify the regions for different eye components. This paper introduces the new two-headed architecture, where the eye components and eyelashes are segmented using two separate decoding modules. Moreover, we investigate various training scenarios by adopting different training losses. Thanks to the two-headed approach, we were also able to examine the quality of the model with the convex prior, which enforces the convexity of the segmented shapes. We conducted an extensive evaluation of various learning scenarios on real-life conditions high-resolution near-infrared iris images

The impact of DM on MHC class II–restricted antigen presentation can be altered by manipulation of MHC–peptide kinetic stability

DM edits the peptide repertoire presented by major histocompatibility complex class II molecules by professional antigen-presenting cells (APCs), favoring presentation of some peptides over others. Despite considerable research by many laboratories, there is still significant uncertainty regarding the biochemical attributes of class II–peptide complexes that govern their susceptibility to DM editing. Here, using APCs that either do or do not express DM and a set of unrelated antigens, we found that the intrinsic kinetic stability of class II–peptide complexes is tightly correlated with the effects of DM editing within APCs. Furthermore, through the use of kinetic stability variants of three independent peptides, we demonstrate that increasing or decreasing the kinetic stability of class II–peptide complexes causes a corresponding alteration in DM editing. Finally, we show that the spontaneous kinetic stability of class II complexes correlates directly with the efficiency of presentation by DM+ APCs and the immunodominance of that class II–peptide complex during an immune response. Collectively, these results suggest that the pattern of DM editing in APCs can be intentionally changed by modifying class II–peptide interactions, leading to the desired hierarchy of presentation on APCs, thereby promoting recruitment of CD4 T cells specific for the preferred peptides during an immune response

Fixed-target serial crystallography at the Structural Biology Center

Serial synchrotron crystallography enables the study of protein structures under physiological temperature and reduced radiation damage by collection of data from thousands of crystals. The Structural Biology Center at Sector 19 of the Advanced Photon Source has implemented a fixed-target approach with a new 3D-printed mesh-holder optimized for sample handling. The holder immobilizes a crystal suspension or droplet emulsion on a nylon mesh, trapping and sealing a near-monolayer of crystals in its mother liquor between two thin Mylar films. Data can be rapidly collected in scan mode and analyzed in near real-time using piezoelectric linear stages assembled in an XYZ arrangement, controlled with a graphical user interface and analyzed using a high-performance computing pipeline. Here, the system was applied to two β-lactamases: a class D serine β-lactamase from Chitinophaga pinensis DSM 2588 and L1 metallo-β-lactamase from Stenotrophomonas maltophilia K279a